What would it be like to belong
entirely in your own body, or in your own country, or at
your own address? It might
be like these unselfconscious, tangled, each-
one-over-the-next-one Concord grapes,
hooked (as in hook-and-eye) on the chainlink fence
between our driveway and the next;
the populous dewy clusters
hang as if lashed
to so many miniscule masts,
or threaded and caught in the stems of their earnest
commensals and competitors.
Each skin gives its possessor neither shelter
nor camouflage, only a violet luster
that catches the eye. For such a wild
varietal to thrive,
let alone spread, it has to be
consumed. The state seal
of Connecticut, designed
in 1639, depicts
three poles, each supporting a hefty cluster
of purplish discs, over Latin that means “Who transplants,
sustains.” On each, a serpentine
red line—a thickening vine,
though elsewhere it could read
as a caduceus, or a dollar sign—
connects the grapes it does not quite entwine.
When the first Europeans to try Concord grapes
made wine,
they found it repellently sweet—
as if a less-than-competent
goblin or vintner had meant
to intoxicate children. So they drank
their barrel ciders and mashed these into jam.
Two hundred years afterwards Ralph Waldo Emerson thanked
“embattled farmers” for firing the grape-
sized “shot heard round
the world”; not many decades
or compromises later, Julia Ward Howe
predicted the “trampling out”
of “vintage,” if not the scavenger-mutilated
or putrefying corpses of Shiloh
or Andersonville, who “died
to make men free.” Unpicked, the grapes
have a musky, or dusky, hue, especially
at dusk, although their promise of easy
separation from the stem is not
to be trusted; fingered, they often fall off
and into the thicket they made, as if
once ripe, they would rather wither
than give
pleasure to us, who have
taken more than our share. The English Romantics preferred,
when they were moved to speak of revolution,
a series of metaphors about dawn.
The motion sensor–operated
lights that hang, and sometimes swing,
like tennis rackets, from the corners
of our eaves over the fence are always darkest
just before they get turned on.
Concord Grapes” from Advice from the Lights by Stephanie Burt. Copyright © 2017 by Stephanie Burt. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.